The Press: Official Censor

The U.S. press last week got an official censor and the first
glimmerings of how U.S. wartime censorship is meant to work.

The censor, appointed by Presidential executive order: 50-year-old
Hoosier-born Byron Price, competent executive news editor of Associated
Press. Because the press had long expected a New Deal zealot as censor,
its first reaction to the Price appointment was one of relief.

Censor Price conceives of his job as involving four main duties: 1)
peripheral censorship (outgoing news dispatches, cables, radio,
letters); 2) withholding at the source military secrets valuable to the
enemy; 3) use of the Espionage Act to prevent publication...